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Cycling: Riis confesses and raises more questions

With the CSC technology company, the main supplier of the €7 million annual budget of Bjarne Riis's team, announcing that it is uncertain whether to continue as a sponsor after Riis admitted that he used illegal drugs to win the 1996 Tour de France and with that race's organizers hinting they will ban him, he faces uncertainty and disgrace.

Worry not, Riis fans. The 43-year-old Dane has been there before and bounced back.

After his victory with the unsung Telekom team in the 1996 Tour, many suspected that Riis had used a mystery product to rise from journeyman to champion. So he did, he admitted at the time: bee pollen.

It was pretty potent. When he arrived at Telekom as a leader in 1996, the German team had been admitted to the Tour the year before only at the last minute. In Riis's opening year, he finished first, his teammate Jan Ullrich was second and another teammate, Erik Zabel, won the green points jersey.

Bee pollen? People wondered even more when Riis's previous team, Gewiss, became enmeshed in a scandal over erythropoietin, or EPO.

Riis stuck to his story for years despite reports that his level of red blood corpuscles, the ones that carry oxygen, was 60 percent, or 10 points above the allowed limit and a sign of EPO use. He was mocked as Mr. 60 Percent in newspapers in Denmark before he retired in 1998.

As suspicions deepened and a minor team he directed became involved in a drug scandal, he withdrew from the sport except as a racing commentator on Danish television. In those days, Riis refused to chat even about the weather with anybody resembling a reporter.

Then, in 2001, he emerged as the head of the new CSC team and, through hard and successful work, rehabilitated his reputation. Confident of his organizational skills, he hired such savvy assistants as Alain Gallopin and Scott Sunderland to direct the riders and Brian Nygaard, the best in the business, to deal with the press.

Last year, CSC won 49 races, the most in the sport. It was also No. 1 in 2005.

Riis has a gift for spotting and developing young talent like the Schleck brothers, Andy and Frank, revitalizing older riders like Stuart O'Grady, Bobby Julich and Jens Voigt and polishing those in between like Carlos Sastre, Fabian Cancellera and, of course, Ivan Basso.

The team was so dominant in early races two years ago that Riis felt compelled to call a news conference to answer rumors that his riders were using illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

No, he insisted, their success was the result of training and bonding in a rigorous program Riis developed. The riders go off for a week before the season starts and work, off the bicycle, in near-combat conditions on land and sea, learning how to rely on each other.

Based on the testimony of such noted opponents of doping as Julich, there is no reason to doubt Riis. Stolid, shy and not overly articulate in the five languages he speaks, he does seem to be a prime motivator.

And now Riis has admitted that he doped as a rider. The main question about his confession is its timing. Why come clean now? Was it simply a lemming-like compulsion to follow five of his former Telekom teammates over the cliff as, one by one last week, they admitted that they used the banned, but then undetectable, EPO in the 1990s?

That is also unlikely. Riders adhere to their code of omerta, naming nobody but themselves. (A possible asterisk here is the case of Basso, formerly the leader of the CSC team and Riis's protégé. Faced with a 21-month suspension for doping, Basso may be ready to cooperate with the Italian authorities and tell all.)

Riis tried to illuminate his timing in a statement before his confession at a news conference in Copenhagen on Friday: "First of all, I'm doing this to keep the focus on the work we are doing today that keeps cycling in the right perspective. The massive steps we have taken to fight doping and the ways in which we have secured that the team rests on the right and proper foundations.

"Second of all, I'm doing this to get rid of the endless discussions about things that are truly in the past and that I personally have put behind a long time ago. I don't want my personal past to overshadow that work and brilliant effort that Team CSC is doing today."

At the news conference itself, according to The Associated Press, he said: "I have taken doping. I have taken EPO. I have made errors and I would like to apologize." He said that he used EPO, a blood booster, from 1993 to 1998 and added that he had also used cortisone and human growth hormone, without specifying when.

"It's possible that I'm not a hero any more," he said. "I'm sorry if I've disappointed people. And for those for whom I was a hero, I'm sorry. They'll have to find new heroes now."

Asked if he would yield the Tour title, Riis said, "My jersey is at home in a cardboard box. They are welcome to come and get it. I have my memories for myself."

One of those memories is undoubtedly the 16th stage, to the Hautacam peak in the Pyrenees, in the 1996 Tour.

Halfway up the final climb, Riis was near the front of the leading group. Suddenly he moved out of the line and slipped back down the group in what looked like a sign of weakness, but wasn't. With insolent ease, he looked the riders over, especially Miguel Indurain, who was seeking his sixth consecutive Tour victory.

Noticing that all the riders looked strained, Riis bolted to the front and opened a 49-second lead that he carried to the finish line. It was a golden moment in the sport, pure domination. Eleven years later, Riis has admitted, alas, that it wasn't pure at all.